Intro to World-Maker 

X-Plane comes with scenery files for the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii), Canada, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Most of the rest of the world can be downloaded free from www.x-plane.com. This scenery (terrain elevation and obstacle) data was obtained by an adaptive-gridding program that pulled in data from numerous different sources. The advantage is that it allows scenery for the entire planet, the disadvantage is that it does not 'hand-craft' each file, so some errors concerning lakes and rivers (and buildings that the F.A.A. does not consider to be obstacles to navigation) can occur As a result, World-Maker was introduced to allow custom hand-crafting of the X-Plane world. You can use World-Maker to improve the existing terrain files provided on your CD or at www.x-plane.com. Three components are responsible for X-Plane's world: the files "nav.dat" and "apt.dat" and a multitude of ".env" (environment) files plotting the landscape of most parts of the world. The "nav.dat" file contains all NAVAIDs for X-Plane. The "apt.dat" file contains all the airports. The ".env" (environment) files contain all the objects and terrain, thus creating the X-Plane virtual world. You may notice by looking in your "Resources:Earth nav data" folder and "data" folder on the X-Plane CD that almost all the env files are on the CD where they cannot be modified. This will never do at all! You need to get scenery to your "Resources:Earth nav data" folder where you can modify it with World-Maker. Read on...   (see the World-Maker Instructions.txt file with the copy of X-Plane for the latest info!)		Latitudes, longitudes and .env files To edit a scenery file to create or edit obstacles, change the height of mountains or fix a lake or river, the correct ".env" (environment) file must be in the "Resources:Earth nav data" folder. First look in the "data" folder on your X-Plane CD. Each ".env" file is named based on the latitude and longitude of the data in it. A file named "+010­160", contains scenery data with its lower left corner at a latitude of +010° and longitude ­160°. Recall: Latitude or "parallels" are imaginary lines running east-west, whereas longitude or "meridians" run north-south. Both divide the Earth into degrees. Each degree is divided into 60 minutes and the minutes are divided into 60 seconds. The location of Washington D.C. is given by the crossing of latitude and longitude: "lat" 039°00"00' North and "lon" 077°00"00' West. Latitudes to the North of the equator are positive values. Longitudes East of the 0° meridian (over Greenwich, UK) are given in positive values. Each ".env" file is marked by its name which is the lat and lon of the lower left (south-west) corner of the covered area. So, if you want to edit the +025­120 area you should put the corresponding env folder ("+020-120", with all of it's ".env" files) in the "Resources:Earth nav data" folder on your hard drive. Each ".env" file covers one square degree of latitude and longitude. Each FOLDER covers an area that is 10 degrees latitude by 10 degrees longitude, so a folder can contain up to 100 .env files. (No env files are required for empty ocean). For X-Plane to find ".env" files, the ".env" files must be in a correctly-named folder, which you see in the "data" folder on your X-Plane CD... we recommend that you simply copy whole folders-full of ".env" files from the CD to the "Resources:Earth nav data" folder for editing... that will save you from having to create and properly name folders. The ".env" files in the "Resources:Earth nav data" folder will OVERRIDE the files on the CD, so you can edit your own scenery for flight in X-Plane. When you open World-Maker you will see at the top left the latitude and longitude of the present ".env" file. Scroll around to find the area you want to edit. If nothing is present but a dark blue grid, then the files for the area in question are simply not present in your "Resources:Earth nav data" folder, or they are in folders that are not properly named. Remember, once you copy the ".env" files from the CD to the hard drive, Windows will think they are read-only since they came from a CD... you will have to change them to NOT read-only in Windows by right-clicking on each file you want to edit and then selecting the file properties. Macintoshes can figure these details out for themselves.

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